Monday, February 05, 2007

Man måste hela tiden jämföra

So I've been doing a lot of complaining about the weather in Bloomington recently - because it's been cold! Today, for example, it was -3F in the morning, though at the moment it's managed to climb to 14. When all this started, it was a huge relief - because it had been disturbingly warm up till mid-January, and because in general I like cold weather. It never gets all that cold in North Carolina (with the inexplicable exception of Boone), and I've always wanted to spend a "real" winter somewhere.

Naturally, when you think of real winters you think of Canada, and a couple of weeks ago I looked up the average temperature in Winnipeg just for kicks. It seemed like a suitably cold place, and the numbers don't disappoint. -22 is the average low for January there (!!!) with the average high not much higher.

But of course, that's in celsius, so it's really not as bad as it sounds. Apply a a quick conversion and you find out that that's "only" -8F, which is what it's been here once or twice. Of course, the point is that what happens "once or twice" in southern Indiana as an extreme case is the average daily low for Winnipeg, so that's still impressive, but not at much as if the numbers had been given in Fahrenheit.

Alright - but there is a number where Fahrenheit and Celsius work out the same: -40. And that, as it turns out, is how cold it happens to be in Winnipeg today. Remarkable coincidence - but I was sitting in class looking for spectrogram reading puzzles and came across Rob Hagiwara's page at the University of Manitoba. A link to his blog netted me an entry on the fact that it is currently -40 in Winnipeg. In other words, only Russians and morons live there.

I mean, just to put that in perspective - I'm sitting here whining because I walked 40min. to school in 0F weather. And to be fair, it was pretty painful. But to get to where Winnipeg is at, I'd have to shave an extra 40 degrees off of what I went through today! OUCH!